This invention relates in general to the field of telecommunications equipment testing, and more particularly to a portable heating tent and method for testing telecommunications equipment.
Testing in the manufacturing environment changed significantly in recent years. Previously, research and development groups would take appropriate steps to provide a proven product to the manufacturing facility for production. However, due to time-to-market constraints, this is no longer acceptable. One key to producing successful products is now being the earliest to market. As a result, research and development departments have been forced to deliver products faster to the manufacturing facility, which in turn introduces risk to quality.
To accommodate this situation, manufacturing facilities have set up different schemes for qualifying new products to ensure high quality. In general, more work is done up-front with the research and development group to ensure enough margin for manufacturing processes as well as the testing philosophy. Further, products are often taken after functionality testing processes have been done and run through a test environment similar to that in which they will be used by customers. This is done to ensure that customers receive a quality product and do not become the evaluation area for the product.
In order to accomplish customer environment testing, changes have been made to ensure that the manufacturing facility is flexible and can handle different issues that may arise. The customer setup is used and tested to ensure that major issues are seen before they are discovered by customers. One important part of this customer environment testing is to qualify new products at temperature extremes. For this reason, telecommunications equipment is often tested at both cold and hot extreme temperatures.
In the past, temperature testing has been accomplished by building a custom chamber for holding the telecommunications equipment. In this scheme, the testing equipment is built as a custom test chamber around each set of equipment which is temperature tested. Generally, such chambers are costly (e.g., in the range of $200,000) to build and install. Once completed, these chambers allow testing at both cold and hot temperature extremes in a process that generally takes 48 hours to complete.
In accordance with the present invention, a portable heating tent and method for testing telecommunications equipment are disclosed that provide substantial advantages over conventional testing equipment and methods.
According to one aspect of the present invention, a portable heating tent is disclosed for testing telecommunications equipment. The portable heating tent includes a tent assembly that provides a housing sized to contain telecommunications equipment for testing. The housing has an inlet to receive return air and has an outlet to provide supply air. The portable heating tent also includes a heater/blower assembly that has an inlet coupled to the outlet of the housing and an outlet coupled to the inlet of the housing. The heater/blower assembly processes the supply air and provides the return air such that a temperature within the housing is established at a desired set point for heat testing the telecommunications equipment.
According to another aspect of the present invention, a method is disclosed for testing telecommunications equipment. The telecommunications equipment is positioned in a housing, formed by a portable heating tent, that has an outlet to provide supply air and an inlet to receive return air. Supply air is received from the outlet of the housing and processed. The return air is then provided through the inlet of the housing such that a temperature within the housing is established at a desired set point for heat testing the telecommunications equipment.
A technical advantage of the present invention is that the portable heating tent is significantly less expensive and much easier to construct than prior testing environments.
Another technical advantage of the present invention is the use of the portable heating tent to accomplish testing at hot temperature extremes in a process that requires much less time to test a particular set of telecommunications equipment (e.g., 18 hours as opposed to 48 hours).
A further technical advantage of the present invention is the flexibility it provides to the manufacturing facility. If the volume of products that need to be tested increases, additional portable heating tents can be constructed and brought on-line within a relatively short time period. For example, a portable heating tent of the present invention may take two weeks to build as opposed to 10 to 16 weeks required for conventional temperature testing chambers. Further, the present portable heating tent allows multiple racks of telecommunications equipment to be connected together to increase testing capacity if needed. The racks can be located in separate heating tents with portholes for cabling to connect the equipment together.